Sure looks different in here.

Why yes. Yes it does.

I’m writing this post in the spirit of sites like Facebook and YouTube, which accompany every site change with an idiotic series of messages and pop-up windows: “We’re making some changes ’round here!” or “We’re sure you’ll love our updates!”

I’m not sure you’ll love my updates. I’m not sure I love my updates. I’m updating the site in anticipation of Tuesday’s book launch. I added some necessary book information, and then I added some completely unnecessary stuff, like a store, so that I could show off all the insane crap from this blog that I’ve slapped on tee shirts while insomnia had me in its grip.

I’ve also cleaned up the design, but already the background image is grating on my nerves and I’m self-conscious about the sidebar and I think I screwed up the HTML, so yeah, I’m thinking I’m not done.

What I’m saying is, there might be some glitches and further changes here this weekend. Links might not go anywhere. Photos might not load. The streets may run red with blood.

I figured you’d need to be warned.  You know, ’cause we’re making some changes ’round here.

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Phyllis the couch is held for ransom.

So it’s Friday the 13th, and that means the second week of January is drawing to a close and that means that Phyllis the couch is supposed to be sitting in our living room, but she isn’t, and I’m pretty irritated about it.

(If you don’t know who Phyllis the couch is , check out the above link. If you’re still unclear about why she’s called Phyllis, check out the brilliant suggestions in the comments of that post. If you don’t know why she’s supposed to be here by this week, it’s because I haven’t posted about it. Read on. If you don’t care, click here to relive Hamster Dance.)

Phyllis is undressed. (Gotta protect the hub's identity in this scandalous picture.)

So after obtaining our antique couch and hauling it back home in our antique truck, we brought Phyllis into the house and realized (much to my delight) that her mustard velvet upholstery was going to have to go.  It was mildewed black in some parts and the cat loved it a little bit too much. Anything that he’s that enamored of is usually too disgusting for words. So we resolved to use the money we saved by adopting Phyllis to have her reupholstered.

I don’t know how he found them. One day I came downstairs and my husband had located a local upholstery firm that defies all the rules of modern business. It’s closed four days of the week. The proprietors don’t believe in signage. They don’t sell upholstery fabric. They also don’t believe in email. My husband had to drive down to their super-secret location with the photo of Phyllis that I posted on this blog.  But despite all of the things that they don’t do, they’ve been in business since the Cold War. I think they’re probably wizards or gnomes or cobbler elves or leprechauns or something.

But even if they are magical creatures, they are magical creatures who are now on my smack-down list. Because I don’t think that fairy tale law allows mythical little men to break their magical word, and also, I feel like they are holding Phyllis prisoner.

Allow me to explain: In order to keep down the cost of reupholstering Phyllis, my husband did all the woodwork himself. He ripped off the mustard fabric, which unleashed a cloud of mold spores into our living room. To control that, he doused the couch in vinegar. Our house didn’t smell right for months. Then he sanded all the  woodwork down and refinished it.

We bought a lot of fabric from a local shop (the fabric has something resembling fleurs-de-lis in the pattern, which my husband liked because he thought they were some sort of tribal spearheads) and brought the whole mess to the couch gnomes, who allowed us to set foot inside their magical workshop. It was awesome – the walls were piled with chairs and couches, and every few feet there was a stapler gun suspended from the ceiling. If you didn’t watch out you could turn around and BAM! –  eyebrow piercing.

When it came time to decide when Phyllis would come home, the head gnome paused. He said he could have her ready for Christmas, and then gave the sort of heart-rending sigh that is usually a signal that although he could do it, it might kill him.

Part of me was like, “Okay, so do that,” but it was the week of Thanksgiving, and although I was impatient to have Phyllis gussied up and in our home, we didn’t really need her by Christmas, and also, moving her into the room with a Christmas tree in it would be a pain and anyway, why would I want to burden these nice gnomes during the holiday season?

I generously suggested that we pick Phyllis up the first week of January instead.

“Second week of January,” said the gnome and then I felt like a sucker who should have insisted that we’d need her by Dec. 24 or Christmas would be ruined.

My husband called this week, on the first day that the shop would be open. The conversation went a little bit like this:

Husband – “Is the couch ready?” (He refuses to call her Phyllis outside of the home.)

Couch Gnome – “I’ll have it to you by the end of January.”

Husband – Silence.

Couch Gnome  – “Something wrong?”

My husband suspects that  – like a little kid who forgot that his book report was due – the gnome hadn’t even started work on Phyllis. So now, we’re waiting until the end of the month, although the gnome said he’d give us a call when and if it’s done earlier.

But I’m afraid that we’ll never see Phyllis again and that the little men aren’t gnomes, but trolls, and that the couches and chairs stacked against the walls of their shops aren’t their creations – instead they’re the corpses of their victims. Oh god, we delivered Phyllis right into their murderous little hands.

So in honor of Phyllis (and because Zazzle made me take down the dwarf one), I made another tee shirt. (I actually have been making a lot of tees lately. I’ve already got quite a little collection on Zazzle. Not because I expect people to buy them, really, but because I’m the sort of gal who loves nothing more than an in-joke on a tee shirt, and Teefury is not meeting all my tee-shirt needs these days.)

Please, people. Appreciate your couches. Love them. Sit on them a little longer than normal today. For Phyllis.

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Send me your beards!

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Not your real beards. Keep those on your faces. Please.

I want you to send me your “protest beards.”

What am I talking about? Good question. This past weekend, I posted about the horrible injustices faced by dwarf women in Middle-Earth.

That post – which featured faux PSA photos of me in a faux beard – has gotten a lot of views, and by a lot, I mean more than the eight views a day I usually get (normally because someone’s been Google Searching for a photo of the chick from Alien Nation).

Since there’s been a lot of interest, I’d like to invite you all to send me your protest beards. Below are some examples.

Ads for the bearded lady campaign

Photoshopped-in text is optional.

You can send me your protest in three simple steps:

1) Cut a beard out of paper.

2) Scrawl a slogan on it, condemning the oppression of female dwarves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.

3) Using your cell phone or your computer’s camera, take a photo of yourself wearing the beard.

Then send it to me at annjoconnell<at>gmail<dot>com, which is technically the fourth step, I guess.

I will be accepting entries until Jan. 20, and then I will post the best ones. And because this is a contest there will be a (completely unrelated) prize. (Yaaaay, free stuff!) The person with the best protest beard will get a copy of my new e-book, Beware the Hawk. (Yaaaay, self-promotion!) I really hope I get some photos of beards, because I’d hate to host a contest and have no one show up. So get out your scissors and your Sharpies, and prepare to beard injustice in its lair.

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The Lonely Mountain is much lonelier when you’re a girl dwarf.

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And by “dwarf” I mean the mythical variety, featured in The Hobbit, not the medical condition.

I’ve been pretty deep in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien lately.  My husband and I just finished reading The Hobbit aloud this evening, taking a chapter or two every day after dinner. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy straight through, something I haven’t done in a long, long time. Add a LOTR movie marathon and the hype about the new Hobbit movies and what we have here is an immersion.

Whenever I read Lord of the Rings, my inner geek collides with my inner women’s history nut and I find myself obsessing about the plight of the dwarvish women. There’s not much written about them, because, in case you haven’t noticed, there aren’t a lot of  ladies in The Lord of the Rings. You could count all the prominent females on the toes of one hobbit foot, if you count Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, which I don’t. Tolkien could write a mean adventure, true, but for him, women appeared to be an afterthought. The Lord of the Rings is pretty much a sausage-fest. Galadriel was like the lone female Fortune 500 CEO on a Forbes list from ten years ago. What I’m saying here is that the glass ceiling in Middle-Earth was exceedingly low.

No one had a lower glass ceiling than female dwarves. Their glass ceiling was subterranean, and not just literally. Dwarvish women appear in one short paragraph in the Lord of the Rings appendix, which Gimli more or less recites in the Two Towers film. According to Tolkien Gateway, femae dwarves are mentioned in Tolkien’s book War of Jewels as well (which I have not read.)  Here’s the breakdown, for people who are not as obsessed as I:

•Only one third of dwarves are female.

•They are kept in the mountains by the male dwarves and only travel “during times of great need,” and then they are disguised as men.

•They look and sound like dwarf males anyhow, (allegedly) right down to the beards.

•The dwarf population dwindles when they have no secure dwelling – this tells me that the dwarf women are kept in mountains to be baby machines.

•The ladies are not mentioned or recognized in dwarvish genealogy (except for Thorin’s sister Dís, who is only mentioned because of her two sons.)

•No one who is not a dwarf has ever seen one, so some men have come to believe that dwarves are born from stone.

That last one bothers me most. Tolkien’s dwarves keep a lot of secrets – secret technologies, secret doors, secret languages – but to keep one gender a secret? That’s a cultural fail. It’s pretty degrading, it’s totally unhealthy and it’s probably abusive.

Perhaps you think I’m being unfair to the male dwarves and to dwarven culture in general. Think again. Anyone who has ever taken a high school health class knows that isolation is one of the first signs of abuse. An abuser wants to control you, so he (or she) cuts you off from your friends, sunlight, opportunities in the outer world, etc.

Now let’s pretend you’re a dwarf maiden. The men in your family keep you locked in a mountain, far away from light, fresh air and  visitors. Your brothers are free to go out into the world to work and have dragon-related adventures, but you have to stay home and brush out your beard. That is, when you’re not bearing sons.

You are kept far away from the outside world, which is a problem since you won’t be anywhere near the door when when the Orcs/Dragon/Balrog attacks. Oh, and the Orcs/Dragon/Balrog will attack, because the dwarves in Tolkien’s books never learn from their mistakes. They always mine too deeply and  they consistently fail to develop effective anti-dragon security systems.  So who won’t be able to get out while all the dwarf-men are running for the door? Right. You.

This is an appalling state of affairs, and something ought to be done about it. I’m not talking about some crazy campaign featuring a wizard and a Fellowship. I’m talking about a grassroots campaign. Let woman, elf-maiden and hobbit-lass stand together and campaign for justice on behalf of our silent, bearded sisters!

That said, I’d like to introduce the Bearded Ladies Initiative, complete with grassrootsy, home-made public service announcements that I slapped together in an hour using a piece of paper, scissors and the camera in my computer.

Free the bearded ladies

Sad, true, and seldom acknowledged.

Bearded Lady Campaign

She isn’t your dragon-hoard, male oppressor!

I encourage those who stand with me to make their own beards and write their own slogans. If you’re really committed, buy a tee shirt. All proceeds will go to me, unless you can find me some real Tolkien-style dwarf ladies languishing under the mountains. Which you won’t, because as Gimli tells us, they are well-hidden.

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Book update.

Beware The Hawk novellaHello folks. Just a brief Sunday post to let you all know that Vagabondage Press has a book page up now for my novella Beware the Hawk.

Here it is!

The page is up, but orders won’t be taken until Jan. 17. The publishers and I are reaching out to book bloggers now, and I’m trying to set up a blog tour.

I also want to thank everyone for the incredible amount of support I’ve been getting.  I’ve gotten shout-outs on people’s blogs and insane amounts of congratulations, people have liked my Facebook fan page. I’ve heard from a couple of reviewers. Someone even nominated me for a blog award. Someone else  promised me a glowing five star review on Amazon* without even having read the book. So generous. Thank you guys so much for all of your support so far. I’ve been blown away by all of your kind words. I was very nervous about promoting this book a week ago but you have set my mind at ease.

Okay – that’s it for now. Tomorrow I promise to return to writing confessionals and posts about ninjas, dwarf-maidens and my biological clock.

*I cannot tell a lie. I will not say no to a five-star review on Amazon. But I am told – by those who know such things – that reviews on Goodreads are taken more seriously by the reading public. That’s where the bookworms gather, which makes me feel a little left out, since I don’t have an account there.

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Me and My Panic Attack: What Fresh Hell is This?

This afternoon, I think I had a mild panic attack.

I don’t know for sure if it was a panic attack because I’ve never had one before and I sure didn’t think I’d be getting one any time soon. My breath became short, my heart pounded, my hands shook and I started to stutter. I was able to quickly dispel it, but I was shaken, and disgusted with myself.  Stuttering, A.J., really? What is that?  The last time I stuttered, I was in high school.

So what was I doing that caused such fear? Making a phone call. That’s it. That’s all. I was calling someone for work.

I never have liked making calls. In college I always hoped that someone else would call for the pizza, but I never had any huge problems with dialing the phone. Like just about everyone in the first world, I have made millions of phone calls for work and never had a panic attack. In fact, I spent a decade making hundreds of phone calls a week, sometimes dozens a day, when I worked as a reporter. I knew, when I was making those calls, that a lot of those people didn’t want to talk to me. In fact, some of them were downright hostile, but my attitude at the time was much more “game on” than “freak out.”

Today, the shadow of the phone calls I had to make – a task that should take less than three minutes – hung over me from the moment I woke up. I actually slept in a little to avoid them. I dreaded them. I did everything else on my to-do list first. I sent emails. I did research. I paced the floor. I went on Facebook. I emptied the dishwasher. Finally I decided to just do it. I wrote out all the things I had to talk about in each call, something I’ve never done before and picked up the phone.

The first went off without a hitch. The second triggered the attack, if that’s what it was. I forgot my name. I forgot my phone number. I forgot my business. Then I was angry with myself, which made it all much, much worse. It took me a half an hour to make myself confront the fear and make the third call.

Now the callbacks are giving me trouble. Though I know I can now go about the rest of my day knowing the calls are over with, and though any callers could leave me a message, I feel compelled to linger over the phone, doing nothing,  just in case someone calls me back.

I have no idea why the phone calls would cause me such anxiety. They weren’t particularly difficult calls.  But all of a sudden it feels like I have a sudden phone phobia, and it’s hard not to judge myself here. Phonephobia sounds like a disorder for weirdos. And since when do people suddenly sprout phobias? Since when do I sprout phobias?

One of my resolutions for 2012 has been to work on my anxiety, which has been growing, inexplicably, over the last few years. In the days since I made my resolution, I’ve been doing some research on ways of handling anxiety, reading books about it, practicing yoga daily to control my breathing, looking for my triggers, all that good self-help stuff that one is supposed to do. Then today happened.

I don’t normally share my struggle with anxiety, which quite frankly embarrasses me, because – as someone once asked me –  what have I to be anxious about?  But I’m beginning to think that keeping quiet about anxiety might be contributing to the problem, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll jump into the conversation. At least I can get it out there. Maybe it will be one less thing to worry about.

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Writerly goals and personal battles for the new year.

On New Year’s Eve, I posted about a minor resolution dilemma. I was torn between posting a list of New Year’s resolutions and checking in monthly on this blog to report progress or using 2012 to work on some major inner conflicts.

Since I’m the sort of person who likes to have her cake and eat it too, I’ve decided to do a little of both. My resolutions are mostly writing-related. I’ll check in on the first of each month with my progress on these.

My conflict resolutions are personal, but I plan to treat them as if they were a project for grad school. I’m going to do more than search my soul for the answers to my questions, because I need a little more assistance than my soul is capable of providing. So I will pair navel-gazing with research and examine as many sides of each issue as I can. By year’s end, I plan to have written a long essay about at least one of the conflicts I worked on, and I will try to publish it. (I’m going to try to submit the essay to a magazine or journal, but if all else fails, I will publish it here.)

The ground rules are set. Here are my resolutions and conflicts: Read more

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Cover art is here! (as is a finalized publication date.)

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I was going to write a nice, well-thought-out post about what I had finally decided to do about my New Years resolutions, but instead I’m just going to post these two things.

First, the publication of Beware The Hawk, is set for Tuesday, Jan. 17. Vagabondage Press will be releasing it as an e-book as you know.

Second, the cover art is here! I couldn’t help myself – I had to share. I am  disproportionately excited about this art. Knowing that someone else read the book and designed the cover based on what she read makes me feel like part of a team, and it also makes the fact that the book is being published that much more real. Maybe this is just a first-time author thing, though. Probably seasoned writers don’t lose their minds when they see the cover art for their latest release. I expect that Stephen King probably greets his new cover designs with a yawn and a shrug.

I’m not Stephen King, so I reacted to the unveiling of the cover art the way my dog reacts when she hears the word “walkie.”

Without further ado, here it is:

Read more

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